Chapter Text
Kyū steps into the hallway, shutting the door behind him with a click. He takes a shuddering breath and tilts his head back as he slumps against the cool painted wood of the door. He allows himself a moment to just stand there and breathe, trying to soothe the ragged, bitter thing uncoiling in his stomach. His fingers itch for a cigarette, but he clamps down on the impulse and pushes himself away from the door and down the linoleum hallway. The smell of the flowers in his hands tickles his nose, which wrinkles against the onslaught of perfumed sweetness contrasted with the sharp antiseptic smell of the hallway.
He finds the room number he’d been looking for easily enough, and he moves the vase of flowers to one hand while rapping his knuckles against the blue painted door.
“Come in,” a voice calls out from inside. Kyū twists the doorknob, nudging the door open with the toe of his boot and kicking it shut behind him.
Rei Todoroki sat on the white covered bed inside, hands folded primly on her lap. She smiles when she sees Kyūsaku, kind grey eyes crinkling softly at the edges.
“Rei-san,” he greets, then a little unnecessarily, “Brought you flowers.” He holds the vase of flowers up for her to see before placing them gently on her bedside table. The last ones he had brought have started to wilt sadly, and he fiddles with the brittle leaves as he leans against the room’s wall.
“Hello Kyū,” Rei says, her voice quiet and pleased. “They’re very pretty. Thank you.”
Kyū grunts intelligently in reply, his gaze fixed firmly on the wood-slated flooring so he doesn’t need to watch the way her face lights up at the pathetic gift the same way it always does.
“What do they mean this time?”
“Asters and Azaleas, um, for temperance and prosperity, I think.” After a moment of hesitation, Kyū sits down in the chair facing Rei’s bed, hands shoved into his uniform pockets to hopefully keep her from noticing his newly bloodied knuckles.
(He’d gotten into another fight at school earlier that day, during the lunch break, which had preluded a meeting with the principal in which it was explained very clearly to him that despite the complications with his enrolment, he would be kicked out if he continued to carry on with his delinquent tendencies. His social worker had been …exasperated, to say the least, at yet another threat of expulsion coming only three months after becoming a student in the new middle school.)
“Have you visited your mother today?”
Kyū nods, a short, jerky thing that Rei must have noticed the blankness of.
“How did it go?”
He glances up to meet her gaze. “She thought I was my father.” He almost immediately regretted saying it, when Reis eyes went dark and sad with remembered pain, but she had asked. And it wasn’t like it was the first time. His mothers condition had been steadily deteriorating for years now. It was almost rare at this point, for Kyū to visit and his mother recognize him as her son.
Rei doesn’t ask anything more about his mother after that. She never did. “Are you here to take me on a walk?” she says instead, changing the subject.
Kyūs eyes dart to the window at the ear end of the room. “It’s raining,” he points out. The glass is treated with a quirk to block the sounds of the outside world, but he imagined that if it wasn’t the fat droplets might pitter-patter as they hit the window panes.
Rei glances outside with pursed lips, forehead furrowed in concern. “So it is,” she muses, mind far away. “I…hadn’t noticed.”
“That’s fine,” Kyū said, watching her carefully. Sometimes she got stuck in her own head, often not reacting to things going on around her, and having it pointed out was usually distressing. Nobody wants to be made aware of their fractured minds. He could say that with personal certainty. “I thought we could play shogi,” he continues when a minute has passed and she hasn’t looked away from the frosted glass window.
That brought her back, blinking at him like nothing had happened. “Of course. That would be lovely.”
As Kyū set up the board kept in her wardrobe, occasionally glancing up at Rei to find her staring at the flowers he had brought, his mind drifted to the first time he’d met her. He’d been a kid still, maybe 8 or 9, and she’d found him curled up under a bench in the courtyard garden of the facility.
‘Hello there,’ she had said, voice distant and with the dreamy-like quality of someone heavily drugged, but still undeniably kind. ‘Are you lost?’
Kyū had shaken his head, eyes swimming with tears and snot dripping from his chin. He glared at her, vicious and bitter even then, willing the woman to leave him alone. Her hair was white like his mothers, he remembered thinking, and it had made him so angry that he had dug his nails into the meat of his thigh hard enough to draw blood— little crescent moons beading with crimson.
The woman shrunk away from his furious expression, flinching in horror at memories of scarred little blue-eyed boys with bright red hair, but a moment later she’d sat down on the grass beside him. A few metres away, not close enough to touch, but still a silent show of comfort. She wasn’t small enough to fit under the bench. “Can I hold your hands?” Her voice was soft and quiet, a breath away from a whisper.
Kyū stared at her for a long time, before slowly jerking his chin into a nod, a little confused.
The woman had reached out slowly for his hands, carefully projecting her movements. She gently unclenched the bandaged fingers from around his bloodied legs and held them between her own.
Her hands were dry and cold, and Kyū could almost pretend he wasn’t being touched by another person as the coolness soothed his scarred and bruise mottled hands.
“My name is Rei,” the woman said. Her mouth didn’t curve into a smile, but he thought the way her eyes softened gave the impression of one anyways. “What’s yours?”
Kyū sniffed, ducking his head down. “Kyū,” he mumbled, even though his mother hated when he introduced himself like that. It didn’t matter. He refused to call himself the same thing his father did.
“That’s a very pretty name,” Rei said.
His head shot up, eyes like flinty steel and mouth twisted into a scowl. “It’s not!”
Rei blinked, caught off-guard by the viciousness of the response. “Ah. I’m sorry,” she said cautiously. “Cool?”
Kyū stared at her with narrowed eyes for a second before nodding sharply in approval. “It is cool,” he agreed, pleased.
Rei squeezed his hands lightly between her own, still smiling with her eyes. “Are your parents around?” she asked, suddenly worried about this tiny slip of a child huddled in the garden and covered in bandages lying in stark white contrast against the tan of paper-thin skin.
Kyū scowled and jerked his hands back to his chest, tucking them under his armpits and glaring down at the dirt covered ground. “Momma’s inside that place now.”
“Ah,” Rei said in understanding, hands fluttering back to her lap.
They sat like that for another few minutes, the only thing permeating the silence being Kyūs quiet, wet sniffles and the sounds of little animals rustling through the garden.
“Do—“ Kyū started suddenly, breaking the quiet. His voice was little more than a whisper, and he kept his eyes fixed firmly on the blood slowly dripping onto the ground from one of the cuts on his leg. “Do you think Momma will come back home?”
There was no reason for him to ask something like that to a strange, sickly-looking woman he’d never met, because he was smart enough to know his mother was sick and wasn’t getting better, and he didn’t need someone to tell him that. But Kyū was also eight years old and he didn’t understand why his mother would choose to leave him, why she would stay in this place when he could take care of her himself, and he loved her, and why couldn’t that be enough—
‘I don’t know,’ Rei said just as quietly, and then Kyū was breaking down in earnest and she held the little boy’s hand— (a boy with the same glare and russet and cornflower colouring as her eldest son) —while he cried in a heap on the dirt.
~
The carved pieces make a pleasant rasping sound as they slid against the board. Rei’s shogi set is the highest quality Kyū has ever seen, made of thick nutmeg wood that was only ever touched on the rare occasions that the weather wasn’t nice enough to venture outside when he came by to visit.
“How is your new school?” Rei asks him, deliberating over which piece to move.
Kyū was sat back on the carpet, hands splayed out behind him to hold up his weight. “Okay, I guess.”
“Have you made any friends?”
Kyū rolls his eyes, not at all surprised by the question. He thinks about it. Has he? Does Shinsou count as a friend? He isn’t really sure. They didn’t exactly talk, but the other boy has started to sit beside him on the roof at lunch, albeit a safe distance away. Kyū has also started finding cans of coffee sitting innocuously on his desk when he got into school in the mornings, and Shinsou was really not as good as he thought he was at feigning innocence. Troublesome.
The rest of the class mostly just ignored him at this point, while occasionally sending both Kyū and the purple-haired boy equally wary glances. He’d figured out that Shinsou has some sort of mental quirk, which presumably put him on the same level of people to avoid as the new kid that regularly beats up assholes behind the school.
Kyū just hums noncommittaly in lieu of answering Rei’s question. “I sent in my UA application the other day,” he tells her, voice bland as he moves one of his pieces onto an empty spot with a satisfying clack.
Predictably, the woman lights up. “That’s wonderful! The exam is in February?”
“Yup. The one for recommendation students is in November,” Kyū adds, eyeing her reaction.
“Oh. You’ll…tell me how he’s doing when you see him? Maybe you’ll be in the same class.”
Kyū chews his lower lip; fingers twisting in the thick black fabric of his gakuran. “I don’t know that I’m going to get in.”
Rei frowns. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she admonishes him. “There’s now way that you won’t pass the exam. Your quirk will be very useful for hero work, and you are more than smart enough to pass the exam with flying colours.”
Kyū refuses to react to the compliment, keeping his face carefully blank and his eyes fixed on the wooden board. “They might not let me in,” he amends, fighting down a scowl.
“Oh,” Rei says.
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’ll just have to do good enough in the practical that they can’t turn you away.“
Kyū swallows his doubts and bares his teeth into a grin. “Piece of cake,” he says, with confidence he isn’t sure he quite feels.
“And anyways, I’m sure there are methods to become a hero through the general education system.”
“Sure,” Kyu replies, and doesn’t mention the fact that he has no plans to stay in school if he isn’t accepted into the hero course. Instead he taps the wooden piece against the board and sits back on his heels, victorious. “Checkmate.”
Rei just smiles at him, not the least bit surprised. Kyū wins every time they played shogi. In all honesty, Rei is terrible at it. The outcome is always the same, but for whatever reason they continue to play.
Kyū checks the time on his beat up watch. “I’d better head home,” he tells her, standing up and slinging his backpack over his shoulder. Outside the sun is starting to set, and he wants to make it back to his apartment before the konbini on the corner closed.
“Alright. Kyūsaku,” she says, when he has his hand over the doorknob. He turns his head towards her to show he’s listening. Rei smiles, her hands clasped in her lap. She hesitates. “I-I’m proud of you.”
For a moment Kyū blinks and he can pretend that a different grey-haired woman stands in her place, a woman with amber-coloured eyes that could look at him in the same way. He wonders who Rei sees when she looks at him. He has no doubts that she is just as good at pretending as he is.
Kyūs face is blank as he turns the knob and pushes open the door. “Take care of yourself, Rei-san.”
~
The rain has stopped by the time he leaves the building, the peach-pink glow of the setting sun peaking through the wispy clouds of grey. His apartment is a ten minute train ride away from the care home, so he descends the stairs into a nearby subway station and hops the ticket gate when no one is watching. He could just use his quirk to warp himself directly onto the train, but the last time he did that he ended up running away from a security guard trying to charge him with public quirk use. Which is just—what’s the point in having a teleportation quirk if you can’t use it to cut your commute in half?
He makes a stop at the store on the corner of his street on the way home, grabbing a discount rice ball for dinner. Kyūs apartment is in the shitty part of town where the apartments are all stacked up against eachother and half the residents can’t pay their electrical bills so it’s almost always dark, but tonight the lights in his window are on. Kyū sighs and jogs up the fire escape to the side of his place. He’s got a fuck ton of locks installed on his window after a break-in last year, and he bypasses the act of unlocking them all entirely in favour of just warping his way into the living room.
The feeling of warping is hard to describe. It’s—pure energy. Like Kyūs entire body is a live wire, buzzing with potential waiting to be tapped into to. It’s static and ozone on his tongue; split second calculations running through his mind. His fingers hook into the fabric of the universe and twist—and suddenly he is inside the apartment. The difference is mild, but not unnoticeable. The sounds from the city are muffled through the plaster walls, and the airflow is different, stuffier.
The man in his kitchen startles at Kyūs sudden appearance, almost falling off the couch in his surprise.
“Ango,” Kyū greets mildly, concealing a smirk as he bites into his convenience store rice ball. Dropping his backpack onto the floor with a thud, he proceeds to hop up to sit on the kitchen counter. “It’s rude to break into peoples houses, you know.”
Ango recovers quickly enough from his shock, pushing his glasses up with one finger. He huffs and straightens. “I didn’t break in,” he points out. “I do have a key for a reason. Where have you been?”
“Committing crimes, obviously. Where do you think I got the food?”
“Off a poor citizens corpse no doubt.” Ango studies him for a moment before sighing. “You’re supposed to tell us when you visit your mother.”
Kyū doesn’t deign to answer that, instead choosing to glare at the skinny, suit-wearing bastard with every ounce of hatred he feels towards him. “Get out of my house.”
The man sighs again, like he’s just oh-so fucking disappointed. Like he expects better. Kyū bites down hard on his cheek, tasting salty iron mix with grains of rice on his tongue. Anger, white-hot and bitter stirs painfully in his stomach. “You know the terms we agreed on,” Ango says, ever fucking agreeable. “You can’t just disappear on us.”
“What,” Kyū says. He doesn’t quite spitting the words out, but it’s a close thing. “You gonna get me an ankle monitor? Track every move I make? I’m not your damn dog, Ango.”
“No,” Ango agrees with a slight incline of his head, the light from the ceiling bulb flashing against his wire-rimmed glasses. If Kyūs quickly rotting mood is affecting him, he doesn’t let it show. “But I doubt you want to face the consequences of continuing on as you are. I got a call from your school today.”
Kyū doesn’t reply, holding eye contact with Ango as he takes another bite of his rice ball.
The social worker continues. “I don’t think I need to tell you what will happen if you get kicked out of yet another school.”
“No,” Kyū gritsout, his hands curling into fists against the hard granite of the countertop. He knows perfectly well what would happen. This was the last middle school in his prefecture that was willing to accept a kid with a criminal record and ties to a high-profile villain like him. It was the only thing standing between him and a correctional facility.
“You want to go to UA, don’t you?” Ango asks. “You can’t exactly do that if you’re behind bars.” When Kyū fails to answer, the man sighs once again, his voice lowering to sound carefully approachable as he straightens up from the coach and crosses the room to stand a few feet away from the boy. “You have a lot of freedom right now, Kyūsaku, living on your own like this. I don’t want to see you throw your chance at a future away over schoolyard fights.”
“Ok.” Kyū swallows roughly, and he isn’t quite sure why. He feels unbearably like a scolded child, and it makes a part of him want to scream, to break something, to curl up in a ball and cry and be held. He wants Ango to go away. “Ok-I know. Ok.”
“You need to try, Kyūsaku.”
I am trying, Kyū wants to say. I am trying every day, every single time I get out of bed in the morning. But I am so angry all of the time and I don’t understand what’s wrong with me. I want to destroy something. I want to be destroyed. I feel like there’s some fundamental piece of me that’s missing, like I’ve been hollowed out inside, and I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t. I hate this, and I hate you, and I hate myself so much that sometimes I can barely breathe.
He doesn’t say any of that. After a moment of quiet, Kyū drops off the counter and stands in front of the older man, hands at his sides. “Get out of my house, Ango.” His voice is deathly quiet, and it is this, the soft dangerous tone of someone a breath away from violence that has the man holding up his hands and backing away.
Ango turns towards the door to leave, but not before tossing a plastic wrapped package Kyūs way, which is caught out of the air. “Your next HRT dose.”
When the man has finally gone, Kyū drives his fist into the wall with a muffled sound of rage, the plaster denting underneath his split knuckles. He slides to the floor of his kitchen and holds his head in his hands, breathing ragged against the cool tile. The silent emptiness of the apartment swallows him up like a gaping cavern, cold and bleak, and with the vast uncaring world held just on the other side of its walls. Kyū isn’t sure he’s ever felt so small.
He needs to get out.
So he gets up. He finishes his rice ball, choking the food that now tastes like dust and ashes down his throat and heads to his bedroom, where he pulls out a shoebox from a loose floorboard under his bed. He puts on a long-sleeve black compression shirt and black utility pants, slides a black mask over the lower half of his face, and blinks onto the rooftop of an udon shop across the street.
The sun is fully set by now, and the neon lights of the city brighten the night sky until the stars are barely visible. He takes a deep breath, the night air crisp even through the cloth of his mask. He already feels more alive than he has all day, and when he takes a running leap onto the next rooftop over, sliding on tiles as he lands graceful as a cat, he even smiles. It’s a feral sort of thing, edges sharp enough to cut, but it’s undeniably there.